[sudo-discuss] Proletariat & lumpenproletariat: 2: Where the power is and isn't.

Sat May 4 10:04:53 PDT 2013

Andrew, you're hella' smart and I have a lot of respect for you, but
rationalizing riots is "not even wrong."

I darn well do understand Black Block tactics, because I've been around
the Bay Area protest scene for @ 30 years and I've seen the same poo on
previous platters all the way back, famous quotes included such as a
fairly well-known East Bay radical saying that burning stuff in the
street gave him a hard-on and he needed to duck out of a riot to go find
a place to beat off in the bushes.  I'll name that name in person, but
not in print.  One of many. 

I'll have a detailed critique of what's in that Wikipedia link later
tonight.  Meanwhile:

The game is, and has always been, to provoke the cops to start bashing
heads, and thereby spark the revolution.  Back in the day, they stood in
the back rows and threw rocks and bottles.  Now they stand in the back
rows and throw hardened thorny seed-pods that can take out an eye or
two, and get all self-righteous when OPD responds with tear gas and
rubber bullets.  Really now: if someone goes around poking pit-bulls in
the side, is it a surprise when they get their hand bitten off?

How does smashing windows at Whole Foods and BofA overthrow the
oligarchy?  What's the causal linkage?

Know what scared the living shitcakes out of BofA?  Not the threat of
rocks through windows.  The threat of masses of people withdrawing their
money, after BofA tried jacking the fees for checking accounts.  Very
quickly a "move your money" campaign got started, and very quickly BofA
backed down from their fee increase. 

A couple of weeks ago the whole world saw the entire Boston metro area
under a red alert, with all civilians locked up in their homes, and an
army of police in .mil gear on every street: did that make people think
about oppression, much less spark the revolution?  The overwhelming
majority wanted the bombers dead or in handcuffs post-haste: now think
of what would have happened had the Tsarnevs had identified themselves
as members of the Circle-A Club rather than Al Qaeda sympathizers. 

"The banks, government, and Wall Street," look down on us from their
towers and laugh.  They laugh when they see the riots because they know
we're burning ourselves out that way and flushing the ashes down the
drain of irrelevance.  They looked down and laughed when robberies,
rapes, and at least one shooting happened at Occupy encampments, when we
couldn't even get a consensus against violence, and when we got infested
with chronic drunks & druggie.  They laugh at us for being
_dysfunctional_ and the general public agree! 

If you were an unemployed construction worker with a kid, would you
throw in your lot with that?

The reason the Clamshell Alliance protests against the Seabrook nuclear
plant in New Hampshire succeeded, is that they were organized,
disciplined, and above all _peaceful_.  And I say that as someone who
worked with them back in the day but now supports nuclear fission as a
vital component in solving the climate crisis. 

The root source of the oppression is fed by consumer-zombie behaviors:
ours as well as anyone else's.  The kids-vs-cops thing is a side-show, a
circus act, a digression aimed at tying us up doing something that'll
just piss off the neighbors and earn us a great big goose-egg.  Look up
the polling on the community reaction to Black Block riots.  Well over
60% of the Oakland black community said that the police _weren't harsh
enough_ with the protesters.  What should we do about that?

Broadly speaking, the strategies are Ballots, Bullets, or Bypass.  I'm
advocating for Bypass: "routing around the damage" by withdrawing
consent and building alternative institutions. 

What exactly do you propose?  What's your strategy and what are your
tactics?  What's the underlying theory and what are its empirical and
historical examples of success? 

I'll be AFK for most of the day & back later on to pick up the debate. 
And this is a debate we need to have, because if we don't end up with
coherent theory, strategy, and tactics, we are going to end up in the
proverbial dustbin of history. 

Maoism and its derivatives haven't worked in half a century.  We're
overdue for a change.

And lest anyone think I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, I can out-doomer
any chronic pessimist by a margin of about 3 billion corpses and a
global fascist empire where barely-surviving proles are obligated to eat
bugs.  This isn't an abstraction: the oligarchy and its externalities
are an existential threat to our species.  The only way out is up.  

-G.

=====

On 13-05-04-Sat 8:15 AM, Andrew wrote:
> Hi,
>
> "This error continues to
> this day, in the ideology of Black Block tactics, which are founded on
> the idea that expressing rage and provoking police over-reaction will
> somehow spark The Revolution."
>
> You don't seem to understand what Black Block tactics are. While I
understand

your point that provoking the police is probably not a great tactic, I
fail to see

what this has to do with The Black Block and Occupy Oakland. It didn't
take much to

provoke police overreaction, unless you call standing your ground at an
"unlawful

assembly" a "Black Block Tactic". Again here is the wikipedia page

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc) .
>
> Perhaps maybe the tactic you are talking about (direct confrontation with

police or closer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrectionary_anarchism)

has more to do with showing people that the police only have power because

we give it to them.
>
> "The proletariat is where the power is: the power to produce and consume
> at the level that drives the engine of oligarchy, is also the power to
> refuse consent in a meaningful way."
>
> Lets be clear, the real power is in the hands of the oligarchy and will

remain in the hands of the oligarchy as long as the banks, government, and

wall street are working together to make sure that the lumpenproletariat

starves so they can feast. Begging for $.50 raises, and a few more days

of slick time, the green economy (ie. simple living ... These are the

distractions  There are people making 50 million a year while others

scrounge for just enough to survive. What keeps the oligarchy in power

is our refusal to believe that we can actually do something about that
and.......
>
> " by going into business for themselves, and by
> developing alternatives to conventional capitalism such as cooperatives
> and other forms of production that subordinate capital to labor."
>
> it seems like our (proletariat's) only move is to join the oligarchs,

by imitation. Which is impossible. Alternatives to capitalism that feed

off capitalism are not the answer. Co-operative are great, but they are

just as much on their radar as squirrel strikes.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 11:30 PM, aestetix <aestetix at aestetix.com
<mailto:aestetix at aestetix.com>> wrote:
>
> You've opened a can of worms here :)
>
> Since elucidated discussion seems to be the modus operandi lately, I
> have a few thoughts on this matter that are worth contributing. Feel
> free to ignore at your pleasure (free listening is just as important
> as free speech).
>
> I think that the two key elements of your essays, food and power, are
> rather interchangeable depending on the contexts. It's (hopefully)
> obvious why we need food. Power in a more abstract sense is
> fascinating to me, though. Other words that come to mind are drive,
> charisma, persuasion, but also intellect, and most important, control.
>
> IMHO, one of the most fundamental elements of control is language, as
> shared patterns are effectively a way to communicate and attain
> various levels of self-mastery. An easy way to experience this is to
> try to understand a foreign language: there might be some hints of
> familiarity within the chaos, and as we find them, it's a bit like
> setting markers around, and using the markers to control the direction
> of your ultimate understanding. You can extend that to vocabulary and
> concepts as well. One of the hallmarks of a good education is the
> ability to curse someone out without using the generic "fuck shit
> damn" slurs.
>
> Language is composed of words, symbols which point to meanings, and
> one of the most interesting set of words is our names. And you all can
> guess where I'm going with this one ;)
>
> Hail Eris,
> aestetix
>
> PS: it might be worth doing another cryptoparty soon.
>
> On 5/3/13 7:58 PM, GtwoG PublicOhOne wrote:
>
>
> > 2)  Where the power is, and where it isn't.
>
> > Now we come to the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat.
>
> > For this, credit also goes to a good friend of mine who I won't
> > name here, but who's welcome to name him/herself if s/he so
> > chooses: s/he got me thinking down this trail a few months ago.
>
> > The proletariat is the working class: basically defined as people
> > who have full-time jobs or at least jobs that provide sufficient
> > income for the core necessities (shelter, clothing, food,
> > transportation, sanitation, communication), but who have little or
> > no ownership stake. This includes people who are in business for
> > themselves, but earning a working class income: they own their
> > employment, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as
> > that of a wage-worker.
>
> > The lumpenproletariat is the level below that: basically defined
> > as people whose employment is marginal at best, and whose access to
> > the basic necessities is frequently interrupted in some way.  The
> > unemployed, homeless, couch-surfers (another form of
> > homelessness), people who live at the margins of the law in order
> > to survive, and people who earn their livings on criminal activity.
> > This also includes wage-workers whose wage income is not sufficient
> > to provide their basic necessities from month to month: they have
> > jobs, but their economic wellbeing is at the same level as that of
> > someone who's marginally employed at best.
>
> > Decades ago, the Bay Area left/radical community made the deadly
> > strategic error of embracing the (essentially Maoist) analysis that
> > the lumpenproletariat is the revolutionary class.  This error
> > continues to this day, in the ideology of Black Block tactics,
> > which are founded on the idea that expressing rage and provoking
> > police over-reaction will somehow spark The Revolution.
>
> > The very same tactic in more obviously violent form pops up in the
> > ideology of the extreme right: such as the Hutaree, a group that
> > was busted by the FBI for planning to shoot a bunch of cops and
> > then set off bombs at their funerals, in the attempt to provoke
> > martial law and thereby set off a "revolution" from the extreme
> > right.
>
> > But here's the nexus of the problem:
>
> > To the oligarchy, the lumpenproletariat is disposable: their roles
> > in production and consumption are so minimal that they can be
> > totally disregarded.  They have NO power.  N-O power.  As
> > individuals or as any kind of collectivity or class.
>
> > When a social movement identifies with the lumpenproletariat
> > and/or attempts to organize the lumpenproletariat, the movement
> > effectively short-circuits its efforts into something that is
> > inherently doomed to failure.  They may as well be trying to
> > organize the squirrels on the Cal Berkeley campus to strike for
> > better teaching-assistant salaries. How seriously do you think the
> > UC Regents would take the threat of a squirrel strike?
>
> > The proletariat is where the power is: the power to produce and
> > consume at the level that drives the engine of oligarchy, is also
> > the power to refuse consent in a meaningful way.
>
> > The power of the proletariat takes two forms:
>
> > One, the power to remove themselves from the oligarch's engines of
> > production: by going on strike (which translates to the power of
> > collective bargaining), by going into business for themselves, and
> > by developing alternatives to conventional capitalism such as
> > cooperatives and other forms of production that subordinate capital
> > to labor.
>
> > Two, the power to remove themselves from the oligarch's
> > consumption matrix: by boycotts (consumer strikes), by
> > anti-materialist or "simple living" principles that reduce
> > consumption levels (the equivalent of consumer general strikes), by
> > shifting their consumption to alternative institutions such as
> > coops, credit unions, and small local producers (e.g. buying
> > veggies at the farmers' market rather than Safeway), and very
> > importantly for _us_ as hackers/makers/etc., the power to build
> > for our own use.
>
> > This is real power.  It's the power that makes the oligarchs quake
> > in their boots and have nightmares.  And it's the power that gives
> > the oligarchs strong incentive to keep us distracted, digressed,
> > and disempowered by wasting our time trying to organize a squirrel
> > strike.
>
> > -G.
>
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>
>
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>
> --
> -------
> Andrew Lowe
> Cell: 831-332-2507
> http://roshambomedia.com
>

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